Courtyard Houses of Beijing: Past, Present, and Future - Softcover

Zhang, Donia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3639996305 ISBN 13: 9783639996302

Publisher: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2011

Synopsis

Classical courtyard houses of Beijing (siheyuan) as a housing typology have attracted interest of people from all walks of life. Due to deterioration, the large-scale demolition of these houses since the 1990s has given rise to heated debates, nationally and internationally. In this book, the author traced the history and design philosophy of the classical Chinese courtyard house; introduced, evaluated, and examined some modern interpretations of it. She further proposed a standardized design template of new Courtyard Garden House for ordinary citizens or middle-income families in Beijing, or elsewhere in the world. The scheme is grounded on the Nine Squares land ownership system in ancient China, urban design studies on robust block dimensions, the optimum courtyard dimensions, and the surveys. The book is intended for scholars and architectural students who care about the past, present, and future housing development in Beijing; it is also for architects and developers who would like to pursue the construction of the new courtyard garden house.

About this title

About the Author:

Dr Donia Zhang is a Chinese-Canadian Author and Scholar of Architectural Humanities based in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. She is the Director of the Neoland School of Chinese Culture, the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism (JCAU), and a translator for the Journal of Chinese Humanities (JOCH). Donia has over 20 years of research experience in interdisciplinary studies of architectural humanities and social sciences, particularly the interrelations of housing, health, happiness, and cultural sustainability.

She has authored four scholarly books: Courtyard Houses of Beijing: Past, Present, and Future (2009/2010/2011), Schoolyard Gardening as Multinaturalism: Theory, Practice, and Product (2009), Courtyard Housing and Cultural Sustainability: Theory, Practice, and Product (2013/2016), and Courtyard Housing for Health and Happiness: Architectural Multiculturalism in North America (2015/2017).

Moreover, she contributed two chapters to the eBook, Dialogues of Sustainable Urbanisation: Social Science Research and Transitions to Urban Contexts (2015), and over a dozen articles in academic journals. She is also a contributor of three entries and translated the Chinese lexicon for the Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (2020, 2nd ed), hosted at Oxford Brookes University.

Donia is a graduate of Oxford Brookes University (BArch, MA, PhD) in the UK and Brock University (MEd) in Canada. She has also obtained a Verified Certificate of Achievement in The Architectural Imagination from Harvard University | edX, and a Verified Certificate of Achievement in Interpreting Vernacular Architecture in Asia from the University of Hong Kong | edX. She is a former associate at the City Institute at York University, Canada.

About this edition

• Publisher: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 3639996305
• ISBN 13: 9783639996302
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240